Environment-driven change management in AEC firms: Life cycle perspective in practice

The growing awareness of sustainability and environmental goals boost the ongoing process of transformation and increasingly complexity of construction sector. As key actors jointly responsible for the built environment, Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) firms are embraced in the change management, shaping step by step their practice and involving both tangible and intangible resources. In this context, the research project aims to understand and depict how AEC practice are equipping and reorganizing themselves in order to address and meet environmental issues. The effort is to identify and map, in relation to the different phases of the design process, the following resources: i) the team of actors involved; ii) the set of tools used; and iii) the collection of data considered to achieve sustainable goals. In addition, since there is no pre-determined relationship between the resources of a firm and its capabilities, the effort is to figure out their relationship, the information flow and their impact within the decision-making process. Moreover, consistently with the trends currently underway that consider the integration of life cycle approach and the implementation of the related methodologies as a turning point, the challenge is to orient and streamline the AEC design process in line with environmental targets and life cycle perspective. To support AEC firms in life cycle design, an assessment framework is proposed to implement - firstly - Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) and - secondly - Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in decision-making and design process. The framework is tailored to suit the peculiarities of the different process phases and it empowers the different actors in making responsible decisions and operations in their own expertise area. To handle the wide range of information required and the plurality of interactions between the actors engaged, Building Information Modelling is selected as the most suitable tool currently spread in practice and able to embed the proposed framework. The outcome is a well-framed and organized set of data concerning the whole life cycle of the facility and the connected process to orient decision-making process and enforce life cycle design for environmental but also wider (e.g. economic) purpose. The proposed framework is developed and tested by means of real case studies, selected by the portfolio of an international A/E firm, in order to recreate ex-post the design process and identify the resources currently adopted to meet environmental and life cycle issues. Furthermore, to fill the gap between theory and practice, it is envisioned its application ex-ante, starting from the very beginning and onward the process with the aim to truly orient the decision-making process, identifying the necessary key shifting both in thinking and in process. The result is the identification of a life cycle AE(C) practice, pointing out the change management necessary to implement LCT into the design process, explicating the progressive set of life cycle information to take into account at each design phase, the connected actors in charge and the resulting information flow demanded, providing different levels of simplification according to the complexity of design projects. In this way, especially when dealing with particularly complex projects, it is suggested the introduction of new competence, recalling the "middleware", capable of adopting and promoting a systemic vision of the project and process from an environmental and life cycle perspective.